Yoga practice in 21st century Britain: The lived experience of yoga practitioners

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Abstract

This thesis investigates the nature of ‘the self’ modern yoga practitioners cultivate. This
ontological question is further divided into three sub-questions to find the answer stepby-
step. They are: (1) How yoga practice influences practitioners' health and wellbeing;
(2) How yoga practice influences the management of life crises; (3) How yoga
practice influences the ‘sense of self’.
Modern yoga in the West has been expanding rapidly after the Second World War, and
the last 15 years in particular show an exponential growth. Although the numbers are
hard to estimate, there were reportedly over 2.5 million practitioners in Britain alone in
2004 (Singleton, 2008). Similar numbers of yoga practitioners were reported in other
countries (Strauss, 2004). However, the modern form of yoga practiced in Britain is not
the same as the Indian traditional form of yoga. In Britain, the British Wheel of Yoga
(BWY) officially represents the majority of the yoga population.
This study has used hermeneutic phenomenology, chiefly that of Heidegger and of
Merleau-Ponty, as a research methodology, because it enabled the researcher to
understand the subjective lived experiences of modern yoga practitioners. For data
collection, 15 in-depth interviews of BWY members, selected using the snowballing
and theoretical methods, were carried out. Through analysis, six major themes emerged.
They were: ‘Health and Well being’; ‘Management of Life Crises’; ‘Sense of Self and
Yoga Development’; ‘CAMs & GPs’; ‘Relationships’; ‘Spirituality’.
Following the analysis of the main themes, I explored the meaning of ‘the self’, and
discussed it from two points of view: the inner-self arisen from embodied practice of
yoga through relaxation and bodily proprioception, and the outer self situated in-theworld
in relation with other people, which was captured as social self, and considered
from various dimensions such as language and ideology, BWY lineage, globalization
and commercialism. In a nutshell, this study found that ‘the self’ for the BWY
practitioners was embodied, health orientated and secular.
‘The self’ of yoga was further compared and contrasted with four self development
models: Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra; Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs;
Dreyfus/Merleau-Ponty’s Skill Acquisition model and The Ten Oxherding Pictures of
Zen Buddhism.
Lastly, the value of yoga for public health was explored using the anthropological idea
of dis-ease. This study found that yoga’s therapeutic usefulness mainly came from
‘empowerment’, providing practitioners with yoga skills to take control of their own
body and health.